China¡¯s Great Leap Backward

[Randy W]

from the Atlantic - this article seems to basically summarize the Xi administration in a fairly simplistic way. I haven't read through the entire thing, but I'll go ahead and post it now and try to get back to it later. I think it applies at an international level, but that China HAS shored up their country internally in the intervening years.


China’s Great Leap Backward
The country has become repressive in a way that it has not been since the Cultural Revolution. What does its darkening political climate—and growing belligerence—mean for the United States?

The China of 2016 is much more controlled and repressive than the China of five years ago, or even 10. I was living there at both of those earlier times—in Shanghai in 2006 and in Beijing five years later—and have seen the change firsthand. Given the chaotic contradictions of modern China, what any one person sees can be an exception. What strikes me is the consistency of evidence showing a country that is cracking down, closing up, and lashing out in ways different from its course in the previous 30-plus years.

The next president, then, will face that great cliché, a challenge that is also an opportunity. The challenge is several years of discouraging developments out of China: internal repression, external truculence, a seeming indifference to the partnership part of the U.S.-China relationship. The opportunity is to set out the terms of a new relationship at the very moment when it is most likely to command China’s attention: at the start of a new administration.

. . .

Nearly everyone I spoke with agreed that China’s oversteps have generated ill will far greater than the goodwill fostered by its foreign aid and Confucius Institutes, which are supposed to teach Chinese language and promote Chinese culture around the world.

This assessment implies that U.S. attention should be focused on getting through an upcoming time of difficulty, which could last years or decades, without panicking that history now seems to favor the repressive Chinese model of governance. “It’s true that China’s strategy is self-defeating,” the national-intelligence director for a U.S.-allied country told me this spring. “But I fear it won’t be true enough, fast enough, to make the pain evident enough to the people who matter for them to change.” For his country and for the U.S., he said, dealing with that lag in the Chinese feedback loop was the challenge.

 

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Fallows
JAMES FALLOWS is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book is China Airborne.

 

 

[Randy W]

Another interesting quote

 

Concerns for the moment, confidence in the long run. To most outsiders, the Chinese leadership’s strategic choices in the Xi era seem rash, overreaching, and ultimately self-defeating. (Obviously China is not the only country ever to have miscalculated in this way.) China’s current pattern of repression at home and aggression abroad may be doing the country so much damage that its own leaders will finally choose a different course.

Domestically, the main threat to China’s high-tech, high-culture ambitions is the increasing repression of the Xi Jinping years. China’s universities will always be second-rate as long as they are limited to a China-only internet. Its investment climate will be limited as long as the government so obviously manipulates the financial markets. “Their political model has absolutely no appeal, not even to their own people,”

 

[amberjack1234]

Good read Randy.

[Greg.D.]

I think the only thing they get right in that article is the story of the increasing control over expression.

 

I think the predictions of China's demise, the unhappiness of citizens, the failure of home-grown technology to keep up with the rest of the world because of the great firewall are speculation by would-be China pundits whose training and assumptions don't track with the reality.

 

China is, by nature, a neighborhood bully. Tech will always be current due to espionage and outright purchase of foreign grown IP. The people aren't that bothered by the crushing of their expression and ability to seek other idea's because this is their legal system and the most important thing to them is the economic welfare of their families.

 

Personally, I AM unhappy with the state of things in their political, legal and economic systems - but it's what they have and I am more concerned with the stability of a system that 1.4 billion people depend on.